Re: What's left over.

Bill Davidsen
2002-11-03T13:42:54Z

On 1 Nov 2002, Alan Cox wrote:

> On Fri, 2002-11-01 at 06:34, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> > From the standpoint of just the driver that's true. However, the remote
> > machine and all the network bits between them are a string of single
> > points of failure. Isn't it good that both disk and network can be
> > supported.
>
> My concerns are solely with things like the correctness of the disk
> dumper. Its obviously a good way to do a lot more damage if it isnt done
> carefully. Quite clearly your dump system wants to support multiple dump
> targets so you can dump to pci battery backed ram, down the parallel
> port to an analysing box etc

Quite clearly SCO, Sun, and IBM have been doing this for years without
offering dozens of options. I don't need it to sing and dance, I just need
a way to put the dump where I can find it. I'm not going to put another
box in at the end of a serial or parallel port, I don't have NVram, I do
have lopts of disk, and so does almost everyone else. I have remote
systems in wiring closets all over the country (all four time zones). They
are at the end of open net connections, unreliable and untrusted. I don't
want to bet that I have a working VPN, or that I can safely send all that
data without it being read by someone other than me.

The AIX support has a group just to beat on dumps customers send. What
more evidence is needed that people can and do use the capability.

I had hoped that someone would do this for Linux, I never dreamed that
it would be kept out of the kernel by people who clearly don't understand
the problems if distributed and clustered headless systems.

I guess the development folks are working on more important things like
xiafs and morse code dumps to the keyboard LEDs.

--
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.